MIMS 2023 Final Project Showcase

Judges

Session 1: Tools for Sustainability and Productivity

Shreyas (MIMS 2014)

Shreyas currently works as a principal product manager at LegalZoom working on their CDP (customer data platform), having held similar positions at Atlassian and Amplitude. He started his career as a UX designer in India, but then through the I School experience, broadened his expertise working as a growth engineer and then a data scientist for experimentation teams after graduation. He has run successful experiments at scale, led growth & experimentation teams, and created data-driven cultures at large organizations. He currently focuses on solving data problems at scale.He holds a bachelor’s from IIT Guwahati and a master’s from UC Berkeley School of Information.

Kevin Mateo Lim (MIMS 2008)

Kevin took his team’s master’s project to the startup world, launching Popcuts with fellow 08-ers Yiming Liu and Hannes Hesse. Popcuts gave users an ownership stake in their digital purchases, and gave buyers monetary and social rewards, with bigger gains for predictive music taste. The three were mentored by the I School’s Hal Varian as well as YCombinator’s Paul Graham and Alexis Ohanian.

After Popcuts, Kevin took a year off to learn mobile development, building Arcadia (Yelp for Arcades) and TreeDat (Pokemon Go for SF’s municipal tree db) and a N(quite)SFW NFC app that won several hackathons.

With self-taught expertise in iOS and Android development, Kevin built mobile apps for Paramount, Yahoo, and NBC News. While at NBC, Kevin moved from the Bay Area to Seattle and transitioned from senior engineering into leadership, building several teams with a core value of DEI and a core mission to deliver quality journalism.

Kevin recently left NBC to take a sabbatical, relocating to Hawaii to be closer to family and reviving his coding skills to be closer to emerging tech. For his next build phase, Kevin is focusing on two key problem areas: social disconnectedness and clutter.

Session 2: Supporting Diverse Populations

Arezu Aghaseyedjavadi (MIMS 2015)

Arezu serves as the corporate innovation and venture capital lead in the areas of media and blockchain technologies. She has had the opportunity to run accelerator programs for companies such as Meta and Red Bull Media House to help them plug and play with startup innovation.  A recent venture of hers is MetaMural, a global marketplace for fine arts and NFTs. Partnering with the Farhang Foundation, an organization that celebrates and promotes Iranian art and culture, Arezu and MetaMural have curated an exhibit that highlights the work of Iranian artists enabling a 600% increase in customers to the partnered gallery for the sale of both physical and digital collections.

Previously, she participated in a series of panel discussions and workshops held by BlackBox, NFTLA, NFT San Francisco, A16Z sponsored techweeks in SF and LA. She also worked at Deloitte as a technology manager prior to these experiences. Arezu has a bachelor’s from UC Berkeley in applied mathematics: civil engineering, with a certification in entrepreneurship and technology (CET), and a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information. To stay on top of tech trends, Arezu has participated and received recognition for 25+ hackathons starting at the School of Information.

Mo Ghasemzadeh (MIMS 2016)

Mo is an entrepreneur and product manager who has worked on various projects within the tech industry. He has contributed to Google’s Workspace product suite, focusing on people search, and established the product management team at Amazon’s Toronto office, where he was involved in developing new display and voice interfaces for global operations. Mo has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Sharif University, a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and another master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Session 3: Algorithmic Fairness and Social Impact

Nick Rabinowitz (MIMS 2009)

Nick Rabinowitz has over 25 years of experience in software engineering, data visualization, and information management. He is currently a senior staff engineer at Foursquare, where he works on web-based geospatial applications. Prior to joining Foursquare, he spent 5 years as a software engineer at Uber, where he led the development of business intelligence applications, helped to launch the open source H3 library, and created the Two Percent Pledge to promote charitable giving for Uber employees. Before Uber, Nick worked on data visualization and information management projects for international and non-profit organizations including UN OCHA, the Women’s Funding Network, Oxfam America, and CARE USA. Nick took up geocaching during the pandemic and is unduly proud of his 535 finds.

Emily Witt (MIMS 2017)

Emily Witt is director of research for ethical and inclusive products at Salesforce. Her team focuses on the design of tools to enable the responsible use of AI, the trustworthy use of marketing technology, the human-centric implementation of customer service tooling, and the accessibility of all Salesforce products. She is a member of Salesforce’s Advisory Council for the Ethical and Humane Use of Technology where she advises on ethical use policies. She wrote A User Researcher’s Guide to Getting Started with Ethics-by-Design, 4 Principles for Responsible Marketing, and co-wrote Salesforce’s Responsible Creation of AI learning module. During the MIMS program, she worked on projects ranging from large-scale quantitative research on user perceptions of algorithmic moderation in online communities, to increasing transparency and community participation in decisions about the use of surveillance technology in Oakland. She remains optimistic about the potential to use technology to support human efforts to work towards justice and equity in our communities.

Session 4: Innovations with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Usman Raza (MIMS 2018)

Usman is an accomplished physician-turned-product leader, known for his impressive track record in building scalable digital health and virtual care products. Over the course of seven years in the tech industry, Usman has spearheaded the development of cutting-edge patient-facing AI-based tools, digital therapeutics for mental disorders, data platforms for generating business insights and real-world evidence, patient services platforms, and much more.

Prior to transitioning to the tech industry, Usman spent almost a decade as a physician and public health professional. He led large-scale public health interventions for HIV, polio vaccination, maternal child health services, nutrition programs, and refugee health, among other initiatives. Usman’s work also extended to consulting for UN agencies and federal and state health departments on epidemic modeling, monitoring and evaluation, and the design of information systems, as well as capacity building for health professionals.

Usman is driven by his passion for utilizing game-changing technologies to revolutionize access to care, improve patient outcomes, and transform the way providers deliver care.

Born and raised in Pakistan, Usman earned his medical degree and residency from Khyber Medical College before receiving his MS degree from Harvard School of Public Health and MIMS from UC Berkeley School of Information.

Neha Mittal (MIMS 2019)

Neha Mittal is the head of product for Twitter growth and very much an entrepreneur at heart. She joined Twitter to pioneer the first privacy product team, bringing the intersection of law, people and technology to Twitter. She also co-founded CityStructure, a real estate tech company and was the founding member of SensorFlow. Her other gigs include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Goldman Sachs.

She calls San Francisco home and is a big fan of mentorship, and finding opportunities to build communities. She founded the Twitter Women in Product committee and the Twitter Product Culture Squad. Most recently, she got herself an improv bug. On a good day, she is busy being a plant mom and rehearsing her classical vocals. If you catch her over a glass of wine, you are in for conversations on startups, cross border cultures, politics, and psychology.